Industry News

Big +1 from me on James Whatley’s thoughts on leadership in the latest edition of his Five things on a Friday newsletter:

Demonstrating that you as a leader are imperfect, that you get things wrong; that you are fallible—and doing so in a way that shows that it’s safe to open up and be vulnerable—enables and creates the feeling of psychological safety. You’re saying “I, the person who is meant to be leading this team, can be vulnerable therefore this place, this team, that we all work...

I think this is a really insightful comment (LinkedIn) by Ben Erez about the realities of being a PM in a sales-led organization. It’s worth reading his whole argument because it’s definitely a spicy take. But the crux of it is that sales-led organizations cannot function with empowered product teams (I think everyone who reads this blog knows what I mean by that, but just in case, here’s a refresher).

Here’s a key part of Ben’s argument, and the really spicy part:

I think sales-led...

I love all the advice Charlotte Carnehl gives in The anatomy of a people-first job ad. If you’re about to go into a hiring phase, definitely bookmark this one for when it’s time to write the job description. One example:

When looking for a new job, it’s not only the position and responsibilities that are part of the package, but also the people I’ll be working with. So please tell me in your job ad: Who will be my manager? Who will I work and interact with most? Once I know, I can learn...

Tracy Durnell brings up a good point about the importance of “lightweight interactions” in our digital communication. I remember the blowback against these kinds of “reaction messages” when they first became a thing. But I think Tracy is right that in a lot of ways, they keep our relationships strong:

The idea that lightweight interactions like a thumbs up or a “love it” comment are not valuable has, I suspect, grown out of a distrust of corporate-owned social media platforms mediating,...

I love stories like this. Turns out there’s a sort-of movement of music being released on floppy disk… I will have to watch it from afar with admiration though. I’m already collecting vinyl and CDs so this is probably not a good idea for me.

There are almost 2,300 floppy releases listed on Discogs.com, most of which are electronic, but other genres include hip-hop, a smattering of classical and jazz, a bunch of metal subgenres, and “non-music” like experimental field recordings from...

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...

We had two periods of Google Search ranking volatility this week, one last weekend and one on Thursday or so. Google court documents say search quality has improved and not degraded. Google dropped the see more results in the local panel this week for a period of time until it fixed...

Google has posted its post-trial debrief document for the DOJ trial that talks about many different things, including stating that its search quality continues to improve. We covered its statement that Microsoft Bing Search had search quality issues earlier.

Google has added new structured data carousel beta documentation, also known as host carousel. Google wrote that this is "a new carousel rich result that's in beta, which is a list-like rich result that people can scroll horizontally to see more entities from a given site (also known as a host carousel)."

Google has added a form where you can now request to opt out of displaying in the place entity feature in Page Insights to users in the European Economic Area (EEA). Page Insights is that button you can press while on a website using the Google app to get more details about that web page, I think it was called SGE while browsing.